skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah the Microsoft store in Palo Alto is pretty embarrassing. You notice two things immediately since you can visibly compare just by turning your head. First, it's a carbon copy of the Apple store's design. Second, the Apple store has tons of people in it and the Microsoft store is empty.
I think a programming assignment is effective at determining how they can perform in a real-world setting. Let them use the internet and any other resources they want (except of course plagiarism), and give them a couple of hours of alone time. An example of an problem I've seen is to implement a program that suggests spelling corrections given a dictionary file and a word. It's simple and easy to understand.
Last year I bought a Thinkpad E420s based on the praise I had read from multiple review sites and more importantly, the laptop is listed as Ubuntu certified. The first thing I did when I got it was install Ubuntu, of course. I'm not sure what "certified" means to Canonical but I assumed that every component would work flawlessly, such as the microphone, no sound output artifacts, smooth webcam, power & thermal management (although I understand Linux sucks in this regard), etc.

A few months ago, I bought a Macbook Air and as expected, there was a world of difference in seamless integration between OS and hardware.

If a vendor such as Lenovo built a Linux-based Thinkpad with something approaching the seamless integration and quality of OSX and Macbook hardware, I would gladly pay a premium over an Apple notebook.
> is there a Republican analog to Nate Silver?

No, not directly. RealClearPoltics (http://www.realclearpolitics.com) aggregates polling data, but it doesn't analyze it. Sean Trende does some analysis of the polls, but he is a lawyer and political scientist, not a mathematician.

Other than that, pollster Scott Rasmussen (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/) has a solid track record forecasting outcomes and is the closest thing to a Nate Silver analog.

Edit:
> does the meta-math

BTW, I think one of the most interesting things that will come out of this election is the impact of cell phones on polling data. The meta-math is based on the sampling models for each pollster, and the models have to take land line / cell phone demographics into consideration. Many pollsters only call land lines and try to accommodate for the demographics in their polling, but it's not certain how accurate their models are.

There has been a shift in land line demographics in the last four years. Lower income people used to have land lines only and mid to upper income people had land lines plus cell. land line usage has dropped a lot. In recent years, lower income people tend to have cell phones only. It will be interesting to see how the the election results compare to the polling data.
> Does following the scientific consensus on issues like anthropogenic global warming, evolution, and sex education make you a Democrat?

The correlation is with misunderstanding all three and coming to bogus conclusions.

Let's take evolution. There are lots of folks, typically Democrats, who insist that it is fundamental to all of science. (Hint - that's clearly false. Disagree? How does evolution matter outside biology? Too hard? Name three biology subfields that don't work without evolution? Too hard? Name three things in biology that were predicted using evolution?)

Democrats like to think that they're scientific, but ....

Let's take the suggestion that state of mind affects conception in humans. Clearly false when Akin said it, but what does everyone say to a couple trying to get pregnant? Yup - "you've got to maintain a positive mental attitude." (I don't know whether mental attitude matters - I'm just pointing out the double-standard.)
That feature, where you have an overview of the whole textfile in the rightmost column of the left window, what is it called? And is it available for emacs?
I once built a very tiny web application with the structure of the GUI in an xml file that was transformed (on the server) with xslt. I probably did one or two things wrong, but it was a complete misery. It could only be worse if the transformation was done in the uncontrollable environment on the client.
> It turns out that it is just not an effective way to convince anyone of anything or to change behavior. It is demonstrated in animals as well as in humans.

Citation needed? I mean, I just want to read the paper where criticizing animals was shown to:

> It can have a horribly diminishing effect of destroying someone’s self worth and stopping a person from believing in themselves.
This is fortunate. I've been looking for a good networks introduction and there doesn't seem to be many online networks courses.

As for literature, is there any text that most people agree is a good start into networks? I'm interested in the OSI model and other network architecture and design principles.
One defense strategy that mitigates some of these threats is requiring all "back-door" access from the public internet to go through a few minimally-configured, easily audited bastion hosts. (As in, packets from outside to port 22 on machines other than the bastion hosts just get black-holed.) After which, of course, an audit is part of the process of locking people out, along with cancelling credentials on the bastion hosts specifically.

This doesn't cure everything, of course. There are a lot of places in many server environments where a determined miscreant can hide time bombs. (Oracle DBMS_JOBs anyone?) But it can be a useful component of defense in depth...
If you've ever been to the Mall of America, its even more blatant. The Microsoft store is directly across from the Apple store.

I was in there once when I got my 4s, and decided why not pick up Forza 4 while I was there. It was a bit surreal, the overall experience of walking in and telling an associate: I want X was markedly different. This store unlike the Boston store, was almost dead except for people playing xbox, and browsing the web on the computers.
> Google had "commissioned" the study but the views expressed it it were solely his and Bork's

I agree with the notion that Google is fundamentally different to Microsoft, but I don't understand why reputable people, presumably without any financial need to do so, take money that would give them an appearance of bias on an issue. I'm not saying either Google or Bork did anything wrong here per se. But I know if I had a reputation to protect, I wouldn't do it, because it would color how people perceived me in the future. I would get both sides to fund it or none of them.
Duo-unix from Duo security [1] works with scp as long as you install duo-push on your cell phone.

[1] http://www.duosecurity.com/
Brendan Eich on designing JavaScript (Part of the JSConf EU 4ß Keynote)
I don't think there is a lack of creativity in Germany.

Ever been to Berlin lately?
That's exactly the reason they stopped releasing updates for my ADP1 back in the day.

There simply wasn't enough internal flash to hold the OS anymore without repartitioning it (something which carries a lot of risks). And the hardware just wasn't up to snuff.
I don't see Microsoft succeeding until they bite the bullet and make their own laptops/desktops/etc... like Apple.

They're imitating Apples veneer and not the underlying reason its appealing.
Is there a way to get a notification if your region is trending?
Remembering Steve and His Greatest Advice
I think it derives more from a too-expansive definition of addiction that serves only to provide a self-justifying platform for prejudice.
Thoughts on the Business of Consulting
Agree strongly, and recommend this architecture to clients. If you can, get all this stuff behind a VPN too, so that the address of the bastion host is nonroutable.
There's no other way to survive against Apple.

Android is doing pretty well without a dedicated store.
For Node and V8? I'm sure you're right, but when I was poking around I didn't see much more than suggestions to use "node --prof".

Which tools have you found useful?
"Doing them a disservice" is by definition not kind, I think.

Note that the phrase isn't "you can never be too flattering."

This interpretation does make it a very vague instruction ("okay, so what's the 'kind' thing to say when someone shows me a project I think is poorly done?"), but it's pretty damned obvious to anyone but the most stubbornly obnoxious that the kindest thing is never "rip it to shreds with cutting sarcasm and mockery".
Also, Poor Richard's Almanac and Oscar Wilde.
Yes but there's a difference between giving useful constructive criticism and just being a jerk.
> why people code on dark backgrounds

I do it mostly because staring at white background all day burns into my retinas.

> I've spent many hours trying to figure out how to convince Vim and/or OS X to lighten up on their font rendering

There was a system-wide anti-aliasing strength setting for OS X.

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

I believe it's 0 to 3 but I can't check right now.
FWIW, we used client certificates for the Beijing Olympics ticketing system. I have to admit they were a giant pain in the ass, but I still have to image they saved us more pain than they created.
"Cargo cult feel" is a pretty generous way to phrase it. The closer one looks, the more it looks more like Jennifer Jason Leigh's character in Single White Female. Check out how they mimic the opening ceremonies for a new store:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dStiYaxeQ4Q#t=4m51s (Apple store)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9Hk0ZCqRxg (MS store)
I welcome it. It's still really early in the game, the more competing platforms the faster the platforms will have to innovate. The inconvenience to the student is pretty minor, really.
Do you need to do it lying down?
> As to "telling teaching inaccuracies", no other teaching is held to that standard, so why is abstinence-only sex ed held to that standard?

Because kids going around with misconceptions about what really caused the American Revolution is less dangerous than kids going around with misconceptions about reproductive issues.
It's called minimap. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap might be helpful.
Link to fan page?
This is a little silly. Intelligent people could easily vote for the candidate of the party that is toughest on public-sector unions for one office and the candidate who is most supportive of a carbon tax for another office, believing both that public sector unions and their pension commitments are out of control and in anthropogenic global warming, and make those choices dependent on the impact those beliefs have on the role. The governor of Wisconsin is poorly situated to influence climate politics, while control of the Senate might not have much influence on whether employees get defined-benefit pensions.

The political parties themselves would very much like you to believe that you're along with them for the ride on all their issues, and this no doubt accounts for much of the strongly held beliefs of both Democrats and Republicans. Push comes to shove, most people have not given much thought to the issues that politics have the most control over.
We should embrace criticism. If it is valid, one learns. If not, one may clarify.

Saying somebody's baby is ugly is not criticism - it is simply useless. Attempting to compare proper criticism to it is even more useless.

This post to me is an antithesis to rationality.

Obviously, twitter is a medium more suitable for quick dismissals or approvals than a well-founded critique of a language. In such, I somewhat agree with the original poster. Nevertheless, to take an early 20th century sales coach's bastardization of good manners as our guideline for how to give criticism in the crafts seems a poor course to stake out for society.
I'm taking the class at Stanford and the recommended reading is Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by Kurose & Ross
I am not even close to conflating C with native code (although it is the lowest level language next to Assembly). C is the lowest level structured language and JS is among the highest. The fact that they are both ultimately compiled to a processor level binary means very little.

Since it seems so simple and plausible that a high level JITted language can be on par with C, why did you not explain how?

You cannot because you clearly don't understand language compilation and the laws that exist between performance and abstractions - so I am confused by your argument.

Let me put it simply, take any two languages - both ultimately compile to machine code, one has the overhead of bounds checking, run-time type resolution and garbage collection (there is actually much more that I could mention but for brevity...) and the other does not. Now please explain to me how the one WITH all this overhead could possibly be faster?

There is only one way - If the C compiler were egregiously under-optimized.

This will be the case till the end of time. All other things being equal, the executable code with more overhead to slow it down will lose. This seems a very simple concept to me - I cannot understand how it is so hard to grasp. Perhaps it is because along side learning Java, HTML and JavaScript - I also learned Assembly Language, C, C++ and hardware architectures.
If the Democrats are so good at math, why have so many of their state governments bankrupted themselves with insane pension commitments?

Reality is much more nuanced than "blue versus red".
Webcam and Audio APIs are awesome. But the P2P stuff is even moreso. Unreliable data streams - brilliant for games. P2P networking - DHTs in the browser! Combined with Web Crypto, heck, who knows!
I've got a mouse with two extra buttons on the side: one pointing into the screen, and one pointing away. I mapped them to Lower Window and Raise Window. In other words, pushing one while the mouse cursor is over a window moves the window in that 3-D direction.

I love it and I can't live without it now.
It was free too pretty soon after IE reached OK though if I remember rightly.

Netscape did crash far too often though in that time period and was probably better even beyond all the made for IE websites.
You'd be surprised. A company I worked for used to cost it out and offer a 50/50 fund of the dev costs if they thought they could resell it.

A fair few businesses took up the offer. Essentially they're paying to bump up functionality in the dev cycle that we'd eventually get round to, but maybe years away still.
> Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

1. Wait -- was I just teleported into my favorite South Park episode?

2. I can't wait to see the civil lawsuits for psychological injury against the perpetrator of this outrage.

3. Don't these people do nightly backups? It's not as though WOW isn't an important cybernetic resource meriting industry best practices.
By extension: seeking the kindest way you can respond means thinking hard about what response will be most helpful and supportive of them. That might mean being supporting but giving them strong nudges towards working directly with potential customers... but regardless, it's about having a conversation that you can exit on friendly terms.

It's certainly possible to do even when you have important negative feedback to offer.
I am starting to believe that there are some people who will never be able to tell the difference.
Key-based authentication in general. Doesn't have to be ssh.
I can only imagine Microsoft is using the stores to raise brand awareness, just like Apple is. But I do find this weird in a way, I mean Microsoft has like 90% of the consumer market (at least here in Europe). Everyone and their mother has used some products of Microsoft in their lives, while the same can not be said for Apple products.

Microsoft apparently also feels the need to raise brand awareness on Windows, as the brand Windows is one of the main sponsors of MTV's Europe Music Awards 2012.
Thanks for all the info, guys. I'm looking into the E3 visa.
Bug fixing competition
Thanks for the potential offer, I really am quite happy with my current work in Brisbane though - I hope you find a great C++ guy!
Who said it was wrong for Silver to have opinions?

The overrating of objectivity has been a hobbyhorse of Jack Shafer's for awhile, and he can be fun to read; here, for instance:

http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2011/09/20/media-bias-gi...
But why even place the burden on the content producer to create these formats? Why not just establish a practice of raw feeds and let consumers write their own parsers? (I can imagine where consumers write parsers and put the code on Github.) Clearly, consumers are willing to do some work with respect to the data they seek, they will be doing some bulk manipulation of it, else they would not be ready to jump through hoops like "API keys".

My favorite data is raw file on FTP servers, i.e. bulk data. For me, it is the easiest to work with. I can translate it to XML or JSON if I want to, but many times I do not even need to go through that intermediary step to get what I want. If others wanted the data in, say, JSON, I'd be happy to share my parsers with them. I'd bet others would too.

I think Tom's point was "Cut the BS, and just give us the damn data, already." (Correct me if I'm wrong, Tom.) And I think he is spot on. This API nonsense has gotten out of hand.
It sounds really cool, but I've done some reading and it sounds like the most amazing moments of emergent gameplay (like the hostile takeover of a monster in-game corporation a few years back) are brief and rare, and the rest of the time I'm told it winds up feeling like a second job.
It doesn't seem to work on firefox with the google disconnect plugin enabled. It might be worth adding a warning about that.
"C is the lowest level structured language and JS is among the highest."

What does this even mean?

Ten message board style points for assuming that anyone who disagrees with you must not know C.
I'm slightly younger than you. I think there's a certain point in adulthood when you realize that you are just like all those old people who came before you.

You realize that your parents, perhaps in late middle age and hopefully in good health, still just think of themselves as adult people, not that much different than you probably think of themselves. But, they're "old", you think. And then your brain finally makes the leap and realizes you're getting old -- because everyone is getting old -- and that in a few decades, you'll be old and eventually dead too.

It's not a bad thing really -- certainly it makes it easier to put aside many of the trivial hangups and foolishness of youth, but I think it brings with it a certain sense of urgency.
There are lots of folks, typically Democrats, who insist that it is fundamental to all of science

You can't, on the basis of zero real evidence, dismiss the theory that best fits the known facts, without causing harm to the understanding of the scientific method as a whole. So it is not that the one theory is so critical to all of science, but the act of throwing it out because it offends religious sensibilities is damaging.
You are wrong. A JITted environment can take advantage of knowing about the current run of the system. As a result, it can do things like unroll loops and inline function calls.

Yes, you could do the same thing in C code, but the resulting executable would be unreasonably large because you would have to unroll every loop and inline every function.

Pypy has show itself faster than C in some cases as well[1].

1. http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/08/pypy-is-faster-than-c-a...
Dissolve the SEC
I wonder if I am the only liberal who hates this phrase?
I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but even now, some of the EPROMs of that era are exhibiting bit rot. The floppies aren't doing so well either.
Agreed. I think the actual reason, in this case, is that Stanford isn't sure it's comfortable putting courses on a private company's platform in the long run. So they've made the strategic decision to hire a team and build their own platform, giving them full control.

This makes total sense; we don't really know what direction Coursera and Udacity are headed as businesses, nor even what online education is going to look like or who the students will be. For Stanford, having the option to cut ties with Coursera is critical to Stanford's goal of being a leader in online university-level courses. And the platform is open source, meaning that depending on what happens, it could become a standard that more and more schools adopt.

And I, like you, think this is good for everyone. The more different the players are this early in the game, the more likely that at least one of them ends up doing it right.
This is patently absurd. The author fleshes out a rich and detailed argument for comparing/contrasting rather than one-sided criticism as a way to provide feedback, but your best refutation of it is to point at the one sentence in which he cited someone you feel is of dubious credibility and proclaim "Therefore he's dumb!"

Oh, but you said "proper" criticism. I get it now.
thank you so much for sharing this, I have the same module in my first year as a Applied Computing student, so this should help me dig more deeply into it. Could someone recommend the best programming related / IT in general courses for me to take? Regular university pace is too slow for me. Thank you so much.
Am I the only one who uses DejaVu Sans Mono?
I agree with you. If getting every bit of performance out of your hardware is important to you, C (possibly with inlined assembly) is the way to go.

I am so happy that I've never had to do that in my career.
For the life of me I cannot find a single sharp edge on this keyboard, as I type on it right now.
In the abstract, a just-in-time compiler will beat an ahead-of-time compiler because it has more information, including statistics about control flow (which branches tend to be taken, etc.) and what exact instruction set is being targeted.
There you go. Dynamic guy. Almost like he enjoys numbers.
The e420 is of the 'Edge' series. What you want to get is a T, X, or W series thinkpad. The E series is just thinkpad in name, so its no wonder that you had a bad experience.

Ofcourse, you are not to blame since Lenovo still markets it as a ThinkPad..
Under some laws 'significant market power' might be a level that triggers scrutiny of competitive behaviour. Google would reach that level for search, advertising and Android at the very least in my view.

If you consider the market for mobile phone/tablet OSes available to OEMs the market is really Android and Windows Mobile and Androids market share may lead it to be regarded as a monopoly. I think that they need to be (and probably are) VERY careful in their behaviour in relation to all the phone manufacturers.

Please note I am making no accusation of anti-competitive behaviour by Google but I do believe that they will fall under competition law in several markets so they are not generally immune from such accusations.
To be clear, I am not criticizing you for finding certain words to be offensive or thinking that they are offensive words. I am criticizing you for questioning the validity of the article because the author used certain words that you find/think are offensive.

I mean seriously...
Out of curiosity, what was your first computer?
What's with the blue "ENDEAVOUR" sign in the last photos? Is that to avoid embarrassing "Oh dear, I appear to be boarding the wrong shuttle" moments?
Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was.

It damned sure was. The browser game was Netscape's game to throw away. And sure enough, they did just that with 4.

IE is still around today because of the large number of legacy inhouse applications and websites that were developed for it back in the day. There isn't a single thing it does better than Chrome, Firefox or even Opera.

None of the browsers shipping today have anything to do with the browsers that were shipping in the NS4/IE4 era.